Why Liberalism Failed

by Patrick J. Deneen

Conservative faculty largely opposed the campus left by demanding devotion to the study of the Great Books without recognizing that many of these books were the source of the very forces displacing the study of old books. Both sides allowed the liberal transformation of the academy to proceed unopposed.

that were the basis of their discipline. Philosophies that preached “the hermeneutics of suspicion,” that aimed to expose the way texts were deeply informed by inegalitarian prejudices, and that even questioned the idea that texts contained a “teaching” as intended by the author, offered the humanities the possibility of proving themselves relevant in the terms set by the modern scientific approach.4

This narrative does not give enough weight to the problematic aspects of those teachings.

humans had any kind of “nature,” then the sole permanent feature that seemed acceptable was the centrality of will—the raw assertion of power over restraints or limits, and the endless possibilities of self-creation.

Ironically, while postmodernism has posed itself as the great opponent of rationalist scientism, it shares the same basic impulse: both rose to dominance in the university in conformity with the modern definition of freedom. In the humanities, this belief today takes the form of radical emancipatory theory focused on destroying all forms of hierarchy, tradition, and authority, liberating the individual through the tools of research and progress.

Postmodernism and rationally scientism shared the base and pulse

The children of the left cultural warriors of the 1980s are no longer concerned with a more representative and inclusive canon. They are more interested in advancing the cause of egalitarian autonomy, now arrayed against the older liberal norms of academic freedom and free speech in the name of what some call “academic justice” and greater campus representation.

Under the guise of differences in race, an exploding number of genders, and a variety of sexual orientations, the only substantive worldview advanced is that of advanced liberalism: the ascent of the autonomous individual backed by the power and support of the state and its growing control over institutions, including schools and universities.

Our commitment to a future of liberation from nature and necessity is illusory—it is the faith-based philosophy of our time.

The result was not merely literal obesity but moral obesity—a lack of self-governance of our appetites ultimately forced us on a starvation diet.

As a result, many of these institutions incoherently aspire to elite status by aping the research universities, with many even going so far as to change their names from “College” to “University.”10

Most sought a liberal education not that fully liberated its students from place and the “ancestral” but that in fact educated them deeply in the tradition from which they came, deepening their knowledge of the sources of their beliefs, confirming—not confronting—their faith, and seeking to return them to the communities from which they were drawn, where it was expected they would contribute to its future well-being and continuity.

As commended by ancient and religious traditions alike, liberty is not liberation from constraint but rather our capacity to govern appetite and thus achieve a truer form of liberty—liberty from enslavement to our appetites and avoidance of depletion of the world.

Increasingly today’s students enter college solely with an aim to its “practical” application, by which is meant its direct relevance to its economic and technical applications, wholly unaware that there is a more capacious way of understanding “practical” to include how one lives as a spouse, parent, neighbor, citizen, and human being.

Because social status is largely a function of position, income, and geographic location, it is always comparative and insecure.

having claimed to bring about the downfall of aristocratic rule of the strong over the weak, it culminates in a new, more powerful, even more permanent aristocracy that fights ceaselessly to maintain the structures of liberal injustice.

He proposes to replace this group with another—those animated by “industriousness and rationality,” whose distinctive character is disallowed from full realization by the monopoly on wealth and power held by the querulous aristocracy.

The means of assuaging indignities, slights, resentment, or anger at the widening gap between high and low, successful and ineffective, rulers and ruled, is the promise of ever-increasing material prosperity for every member of society.

This is liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility.

Liberalism’s most fundamental wager: the masses will except the inequality of society based on the slim hope of upward mobility

Hayek acknowledges that the liberal society will generate as much inequality as the order it replaced, or even more, but the promise of constant change and progress will ensure that everyone supports the liberal system. He is confident that even potentially titanic inequality—far outstripping the differences between peasant and king—will nevertheless lead to nearly universal endorsement of such a political and economic system.

Liberalism today is widely identified as the opposite of early-modern liberalism’s encouragement of economic liberty and hence stratification, instead stressing the imperative for greater economic equality.

For progressive liberalism, it was best achieved by empowering the State to equalize the fruits of an increasingly prosperous society while intervening more actively in the realms of church, family, and even human sexuality.

The progressive effort to make economic disparities more equal (without actually ever equalizing them) is driven by a deeper liberal imperative to equalize individuals’ opportunity to be liberated from entanglements with others, particularly from the shared cultural norms, institutions, and associations that bind a people’s fate together.

The deepest irony is that while our politics today is manifested as a clash of classical liberals against progressive liberals, we have seen a steady advance in both economic liberation and personal liberation.

This is because progressive liberalism was never actually a foe of classical liberalism. Its true enemy was a kind of lived “Burkeanism”: the way of life of much of humanity.

at greatest liberty to do so. In contrast to the argument by Yuval Levin that “the Great Debate” was between Burke and Paine, the “culture wars” of our time have more to do with differences between intuitive Burkeans and forthright disciples of Mill.

But custom had come to dominate too extensively; and that “which threatens human nature is not the excess, but the deficiency, of personal impulses and preferences.”

Mill called for a society premised around “experiments in living”: society as test tube for the sake of geniuses who are “more individual.” We live today in the world Mill proposed. Everywhere, at every moment, we are to engage in experiments in living. Custom has been routed: much of what today passes for culture—with or without the adjective “popular”—consists of mocking sarcasm and irony.

Late night television is the special sanctuary of this liturgy. Society has been transformed along Millian lines in which especially those regarded as judgmental are to be special objects of scorn, in the name of nonjudgmentalism.

The rejection of custom demanded that society’s most “advanced” elements have greater political representation.

Mill feared the tyranny of public opinion, expressed through custom, but Burke argued that the tyrannical impulse was far more likely found among the “innovators” and might be restrained by prejudice. It was the unshackled powerful who were to be feared, not the custom-following ordinary citizens. Burke saw a close relationship between the revolutionary and tyrannical impulse, made particularly insidious when the Great could claim the mantle of popular legitimacy: “The spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper. … When they are not on their guard, [the democratists] treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of their power.”13

A society can be shaped for the benefit of most people by emphasizing mainly informal norms and customs that secure the path to flourishing for most human beings; or it can be shaped for the benefit of the extraordinary and powerful by liberating all from the constraint of custom. Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary; today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong.

Children of the successful receive preparation for entry into the ruling class, while those who lack those attainments are much less capable of affording, and insufficiently knowledgeable about, the basic prerequisites needed to push their children into the upper echelon.

The SAT cheating scandal

The “noble lie” proposes a story by which the denizens of the “ideal regime” proposed by Socrates at once believe in their fundamental equality as members of a common family and in the natural basis of their inequality.

A primary vehicle has been a veneer of social justice and concern for the disadvantaged that is keenly encouraged among liberalocrats from a young age, often at the very educational institutions most responsible for their elevation into the elite.

A degraded form of citizenship arises from liberalism’s relentless emphasis upon private over public things, self-interest over civic spirit, and aggregation of individual opinion over common good.

Instead, the true genius of liberalism was subtly but persistently to shape and educate the citizenry to equate “democracy” with the ideal of self-made and self-making individuals—expressive individualism—while accepting the patina of political democracy shrouding a powerful and distant government whose deeper legitimacy arises from enlarging the opportunities and experience of expressive individualism.

The genius of liberalism is the populace’s association with democracy and expressive individualism

Thus liberalism abandons the pervasive challenge of democracy as a regime requiring the cultivation of disciplined self-rule in favor of viewing the government as a separate if beneficent entity that supports limitless provision of material goods and untrammeled expansion of private identity.

Democracy is thus an acceptable legitimating tool only as long as its practices exist within, and are broadly supportive of, liberal assumptions. When democratic majorities reject aspects of liberalism—as electorates throughout western Europe and America have done in recent years—a growing chorus of leading voices denounce democracy and the unwisdom of the masses.

maximize). Progressives were the great proponents of a growth in government bureaucracy—the professionalization of politics—and the “science” of administration.

prerequisite for objective public policy. “Nothing is more liable to lead astray,” wrote A. Gordon Dewey of Columbia University, “than the injection of moral considerations into essentially non-moral, factual investigation.”

Ironically, in an age in which science is interested in the ways that human activity is altering some basic assumptions about the natural world—especially climate change—a basic assumption of social science is that measurements of political “competence” are reflections of given facts.

Whether social scientists conclude from measurements of civic ignorance and indifference that democracy should be jettisoned or that efforts at “civic education” should be increased, the basic assumption is the same: liberalism can correct what most contemporary liberals can’t recognize that liberalism itself created. The ignorance of its own history and aims—the “presentism” of liberals—is one of liberalism’s greatest defenses against recognition that it generates a civic catastrophe that it then claims it must cure by the application of more liberalism.

The persistent absence of civic literacy, voting, and public spiritedness is not an accidental ill that liberalism can cure; it is the outcome of liberalism’s unparalleled success.